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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov
Sacrifice And Civic Membership: Who Earns Rights, And When?, Julie Novkov
Julie Novkov
This paper considers two moments that scholars generally agree featured advances for African Americans’ citizenship – the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its immediate aftermath – and reads these moments through lenses of race and gender. I consider the conjunction of acknowledged sacrifices and contributions to the state, the rights advances achieved, and the gendered and racialized conceptions of citizen service emerging out of both post-war periods. This conjunction suggests that the kind of citizenship that people of color gained during and after wartime crises depended upon gendered and racialized hierarchies that valued …
Fractured Bonds: Policing Whiteness And Womanhood Through Race-Based Marriage Annulments, Bela August Walker
Fractured Bonds: Policing Whiteness And Womanhood Through Race-Based Marriage Annulments, Bela August Walker
Bela August Walker
In the hundred years before the United States Supreme Court declared miscegenation statutes unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, state courts decided thirteen recorded race-based annulment cases. This article presents a unified analysis of all race based annulment cases for the first time. Simultaneously public and private affairs, these dramas impacted far more than the individual couples or courtrooms, sending out shockwaves that reverberated beyond their points of origin. The results of the cases are startling and contrary to previous work on the subject. Using this unique set of cases, this article argues that while declaring these women “white” appears like …